Merry Christmas!Happy (fifth night of) Hanukkah!!*عيد الميلاد مبارك

*(Are we saying this now?)

Even though the Emirates Palace apologized for its last year’s “attempts to overload the tradition” by decking out a 43-foot plastic tree in diamonds and pearls, the UAE is hotter on X-mas than ever before.

According to one very high level administrator at a foreign-run university in the UAE (and I paraphrase), “the government was giving me flak for not putting a Christmas tree on campus.” Apparently, they wouldn’t have been cool with a menorah.

For $15 an hour, any taxi driver will take you the length of this Long Island and back (about an hour and a half between the furthest points). Whether you’re stuck or just visiting or visiting and stuck — return flights are often delayed by twelve hours or a day — there are at least two full days worth of informed wandering. The otherworldly caves and mangroves and beaches of Qeshm are exceptional and untrodden, and without parallel on the more visitable coasts of the Persian Gulf.

Our driver balked when the paved road turned to dirt, making a machine gun sign with his hands and charading I don’t think you are supposed to go here with worried eyebrows. We had heard half-formed rumors about gunfire in the empty areas towards the south, potentially the army (or someone’s army) in training, but we coaxed him onwards and never had to duck and cover. We never saw anything remotely unsafe.

If the island were a dolphin — it is shaped a bit like one — the magnificent mangrove forests would be just behind its dorsal fin. The tangled roots of mangroves work to solidify the coastline, holding the mud in place and extending out into open water that covers the roots completely at high tide. A mangrove forest looks like a Venetian neighborhood. Greenery lines more than ten miles of the northern coast, stretching across the narrow Straight of Khuran almost to the shores of southern Iran. A sign points to the Jengel Hara (a.k.a. the Hara Protected Area, established 1972).

Geshm’s particular mangroves are home to the hara tree, lushous green with yellow flowers and an almond-like fruit in the summer. For twenty-five dollars a boatman singing old songs in Arabic motored us out through the shallow channels, past blue and white herons and flat-billed birds flaunting their mandibles from higher ground. When the spot looked right, we hopped off the side into the mud.

After dark, we found lots of young people at Nemat’s Ice Cream, offering fifty-some flavors from hazelnut to melon to something that tasted like spray paint (beware the four scoop minimum). Our hands oily from plates of tomshi, like crispy Persian crepes, that was where Maral took us first. Maral was from Shiraz, one of the island’s four CouchSurfers, and an immensely eager and delighted tour guide. She was studying physical therapy at a Shahid Beheshti Medical University.

There wasn’t a whole lot, but what there was in Qeshm was relaxed and (sometimes) lively. And it did beat the Hotel Diplomat. Maral’s friends and the other young women around Nemat’s were unveiled, wearing bright, patterned scarves that left much of their hair showing — but it wasn’t like Shiraz, Maral said, where she would hardly readjust her headscarf if it fell. If I had expected (the image of) Saudi Arabia in Iran, I was mistaken. Foreign is welcome: Maral was an avid downloader of Gray’s Anatomy. On her Facebook, she lists Woody Allen as a favorite artist.

She took us by taxi (twenty thousand dinar, a buck-fifty, for anywhere in town) to the Portuguese Fort built in 1507 and destroyed a century later by Persian “liberators.” On the northern tip of the island, the fort is surrounded by one of the poorer neighborhoods of Qeshm locals (as opposed to mainland workers or students). Maral classified the locals as ethnically Arab. “I ask if they celebrate Eid-al Fitr or Nowruz,” the Persian New Year on March 21. “They say, ‘We celebrate Eid al-Fitr… that’s what we’ve always done.’”